Various sites may participate at one time during a multisite conference. In such a situation, a participant at one of the sites may be presenting information and speaking, but noise, talking, and the like from the other sites may interfere. Currently, a presenter at the one site may have to ask all of the other sites in the multipoint conference to mute their microphones manually so that unwanted noise will be made part of the conference audio. Alternatively, a conference administrator may have to mute or reduce audio levels manually at a multipoint control unit so that undesirable audio does not become part of the conference.
As expected, these techniques may not always be effective. For example, an operator required to mute audio manually may not always perform that function so that conference participants will not be certain whether their audio is being muted or not, creating confusion. In addition, conferences can be dynamic, and multiple operators may have to mute audio manually at different times, which can create further confusion. Therefore, it is desirable to have an automatic way to eliminate or reduce audio from multipoint sites that are not presenting at a current time during a conference.